Ground Zero
by dharmamonkey
Summary: In honor of the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  In this short one-shot, Brennan and Booth reflect on their experiences in the days following the September 11th attacks.


_**A/N****: **_

_**This fanfic is dedicated to the memory of the 2,977 innocent people killed in the 9/11 attacks. **May their memories live on in our dedication to the values that make us American: an unswerving devotion to equal justice under law and freedom of expression, religion and association._

_In this short one-shot, Brennan and Booth reflect on their experiences in the days following the September 11th attacks._

_I don't own _Bones. _All rights reserved, etc._

_Thanks to everyone who has left reviews on my previous efforts. Every time I post something, I find myself checking my emails a couple of times an hour to see if I've gotten any reviews. Reviews really do keep me writing. It's the truth. I crave feedback: good, bad, long, short, generic or otherwise. I need to know if I'm doing the right thing here. So, __**please **__leave a review!_

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><p>Click.<p>

"—_and coming up next...'Let's Roll: The Heroes of United Flight 93'..."_

Click.

"—_for tonight's special investigative report on the lessons _not_ learned by the FBI and the other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies after September 11th..."_

Click.

"—_the untold story of the heroes of Ladder 3..._"

"Ugh," Booth sighed, leaning his head back, rolling his neck over the top of the couch as he swallowed hard, his adam's apple bobbing up and down. "Bones..."

"Yes, Booth," Brennan said, rubbing her hand absently over the now-noticeable swell of her abdomen.

"I can't watch this stuff," he said, sighing deeply. "I just can't." He lifted the remote and turned off the plasma-screen TV. He glanced over at her with a smile and reached for her hand, placing his larger hand over hers that rested on her belly.

"It's okay, Booth," she said. "I spent two months there, picking human remains out of the rubble," she said grimly. "I have no desire to spend the evening watching the major media outlets rehash the experience."

He nodded, shaking his head at the thought of his partner, his beautiful, wonderful Bones, knee-deep in dusty rubble—retrieving hands, feet, pieces of skull, bone, flesh and hair out of the shattered concrete, pulverized glass and twisted steel.

For a couple of minutes, they sat on her couch in silence, each of them thinking about that terrible day ten years before when it seemed the whole world changed in an instant—ten years that seemed a lifetime ago. It seemed like a distant, foreign reality, like another world: a world without airport x-ray machines and body scanners, a world where federal office buildings and courthouses didn't have Jersey barriers in front of them, a world without drone aircraft missions into Waziristan, a world without no-fly lists and passenger redress numbers, a world where mosques and Muslim community centers didn't have to have 24-hour security, a world without back-to-back tours to Afghanistan and Iraq, a world without a Department of Homeland Security or a TSA.

Booth looked up from his daze and smiled at his partner. "I saw you there, Bones," he said quietly.

"What?" She shook her head and clenched her eyes shut, trying to banish a memory from those unreal days and weeks.

"I saw you there at Ground Zero," he said, raising his eyebrows and crinkling his brow. "The day after," he said, pursing his lips at the memory of the hazy courtyard of rubble where the Twin Towers stood.

She narrowed her eyes, a vague smile briefly appearing on her lips. "I got there on the twelfth," she said. "Early morning on the twelfth. I drove straight through from Chicago with Michael Stires and another graduate student. When we got there, they didn't have any idea how many people had been killed—they were saying 8,000, maybe 10,000 in the Twin Towers alone." Her jaw tensed at the thought of it. "On a typical workday, up to 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center."

Booth shuddered at the thought of it.

"I remember you," he said. "Standing there, in jeans, boots and a henley shirt, your sleeves pushed up around your elbows, latex gloves on your hands." He leaned over and stroked her forehead, brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes and tucking it behind her ear. "You were wearing a baseball cap, a dusty one that said _Passaic FD, Ladder 2, _you know, with your ponytail sticking out the back."

"Yes," she whispered, remembering the New Jersey firefighter that gave her his ballcap.

He tilted his head, surprised that she seemed, well, so unsurprised that he remembered seeing her there.

"I remember you," she said, biting her lower lip as she looked up at him. "You were so young," she said.

"So were you," he chuckled. "We both were," he said, a sadness having suddenly came over him.

"You were there in your FBI T-shirt, and straight-cut Levis," she said, smiling at the memory. "And combat boots, with lug soles."

"My old Army boots," he whispered. "How did—how do you know it was me?" he asked.

"Your bone structure, of course," she said with a smirk. "Even with the respirator on, I noted the square shape of your mandible and the high, prominent arch of your zygomatic," she smiled. She touched his jaw with her index finger, tracing the line of his mandible and the two days' growth of beard that had grown since Friday. "You have a very distinctive bone structure."

"Respirators," he murmured. He hated wearing one—it was so hot, itchy and uncomfortable, but never for a moment questioned wearing it. The dust seemed to hang in the air for weeks after the Towers' collapse. "Even with the respirator," he said, "I noticed your eyes. You have the most unforgettable eyes, Bones."" He touched her rounded belly, thinking of what kind of world their daughter would be born into. Was it a better one, or a worse one, than the one that existed before September 11th?

She smiled at the sight of his large, veiny hand on the swell of her abdomen. "So, when you saw me lecturing in front of my class at American, that morning when you came to see me about Gemma Arrington, did you remember me from Ground Zero?"

He grinned and shook his head. "No," he admitted. "But there was definitely something striking and—I couldn't put my finger on it at the time—familiar about the look in your eyes when I met you that morning. It took me a long time to figure it out—what it was that gave me that feeling that morning." He thought back to prior anniversaries. "I think it occurred to me on the fifth anniversary of the attack, as I was watching one of the TV shows about the bucket brigades." He stroked his finger across her chin.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked. "You know, that you had seen me before?"

He laughed. "Why didn't you tell me that you'd seen _me _before?" he retorted.

She shrugged. "I try not to think too much about that time," she whispered. "I've seen a lot of horrible things since then—you know, mass graves in Guatemala, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, the Congo, Yugoslavia—but I was a twenty-five year old doctoral student when I worked at Ground Zero. Those things, those places I've seen since then..." She swallowed, then leaned over and put her head on his shoulder. "Ground Zero was the first mass grave I ever worked."

Booth pulled her close to his chest, rubbing his hand on her arm. "And it was here, in the U.S. As if all the senseless hate, all that tribal rage, reached out, across the ocean, to snap us out of our little bubble."

"Why were you there, Booth?" Brennan asked, nuzzling into his shoulder and inhaling his scent, the smell of him that she had grown to know and take comfort in over the six years of their partnership.

He looked up at the ceiling, remembering. "I was fairly fresh out of Quantico, having just graduated in May of that year. My first posting was to the FBI Field Office in Newark, in the organized crime unit. I had a meeting that morning with an undercover asset in a high-rise in Hoboken, right across the river from Lower Manhattan. I was watching the North Tower burning out the asset's office window when we saw the second plane hit the South Tower." He felt an ache in his chest as the images played in his mind. "I watched the first, and then the second tower collapse," he said, his voice cracking. "I thought of all the people in there, and knew—just knew, you know—that so many people were dead."

"I watched it on TV," she whispered. "In the lounge at the student union at Northwestern."

"I've seen a lot of horrible things, Bones," he said. "So have you. I know, so have you. But I've never felt as helpless as I felt that morning, watching those towers burn, and watching them collapse into dust. The FBI sent a huge cadre of us into New York in the days following the attack. I don't even think _they _knew why they sent us. I was young, an inexperienced. I didn't end up doing much except bag evidence."

"Michael Stires had gotten a call early that afternoon," Brennan said. "From the New York medical examiner's office. They knew they were dealing with a mass casualty of unimaginable proportions and they knew they needed help—you know, identifying all of the bodies. They didn't even know how many. So they called him, and a few other forensic anthropologists who were within a day or two's driving distance—you know, because—"

"Because they shut down U.S. airspace for days," he said, blinking as he tried to push away the flood of emotions that were washing over him as he remembered watching the Brooklyn Bridge turn into a giant pedestrian walkway, teeming with tens of thousands of New Yorkers trying to get off Manhattan.

"Yes," she whispered. "We drove the fifteen hours, straight through, that night—me, Stires and another one of his Ph.D. students—and we got to Newark around six in the morning. There was a staging area there for out of town support personnel like us. We hitched a ride with a group of firefighters from Passaic. There was an eerie glow as you came out of the Lincoln Tunnel—all the floodlights that were used to illuminate the site, it cast a very strange glow..."

"I remember," Booth whispered, kissing her temple.

"We don't need to watch all those ridiculous retrospective programs," she said, rubbing her palm on the inside of his knee.

"No," he said, placing his hand over hers and squeezing it.

"We were there."

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><p><strong>Never forget.<strong>

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><p><em>Okay, that was heavy.<em>

_Not my typical fanfic. But it came to me, and I felt it was important to share._

_Please tell me what you think...  
>Good, bad or indifferent, I want your reviews.<br>Please, please, **please**, **PLEASE **review!_

_Thanks!_


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